Adventures in Teaching Kids How to Code

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Code Club news

Earlier this year, Code Club and West London Zone, a local children’s charity, started to work together to start up Code Clubs. In this blog, we found out how the collaboration has already reached 4 schools in West London.

West London Zone are a local charity who work with young people aged 3 – 18 in two boroughs of London, Hammersmith and Fulham and Kensington and Chelsea. Through their work with local schools, they offer children and young people a range of opportunities to help them achieve their potential, enjoy new experiences and develop important knowledge and skills.

At a meeting with some partners, they heard about Code Club and got in touch with Dan Elwick, our Coordinator for London.

“It is incredibly valuable for the Raspberry Pi Foundation to be working with West London Zone, they are helping us to reach schools that do not already have Code Clubs and their Link Workers are in a position to give children at those schools the opportunity to try coding and digital making activities that they might not have otherwise.”– Dan Elwick

Dan in action at a training session, similar to the one he ran with the WLZ team.

In September 2018, Dan held a training session for 20 WLZ Link Workers, who are based in schools and work closely with children and young people to proactively identify opportunities for them. The training session introduced the Link Workers to Code Club and they created an animation using the Lost in Space project. Dan said: “For many, it was the first time that they had used Scratch and they were enthusiastic about introducing it to the children they work with.”

It’s been great to collaborate with Code Club and introduce more children and young people to develop the knowledge and skills needed to code. We’re really excited about how we might be able to develop more Code Clubs and our partnership in the future.

Code Club love to collaborate. If you work for an organisation and would like to know more about how we could work together to reach more young people through Code Club, get in touch at hello@codeclub.org.uk

Team Code Club are beyond excited to tell you that the first-ever Code Club book is now available! You can get it as a free download, or you can buy a physical copy now.

The Code Club Book of Scratch is aimed at kids aged 9–13 who want to start learning to code using Scratch.

Each chapter has instructions for building a cool project with Scratch. If you’re already a fan of our Code Club projects, you’ll find old favourites such as Rock Band, Lost in Space, Ghost Catcher, Chat Bot, and Boat Race. Plus, there’s a brand-new project called On Target for creating a game to learn about coordinates.

Our friendly Code Club robot will guide you through the projects and give you handy tips along the way. There are tick boxes so you can keep track of your progress (we love tick boxes), and a chart you can fill with stickers whenever you finish a chapter (we also love stickers).

We’ve also included lots of challenges to help you change and personalise your code creations, and plenty of ideas to inspire your next projects!

Coding can be tricky: even the world’s best computer scientists get stuck sometimes. So the book also has some secret, hidden hints and tips that you can only see when you put on the special computer science glasses included at the front of the book. Only to be used in emergencies — or maybe when you just want to look really cool!

Get your copy of the Code Club Book of Scratch today: find the free download at here or order your physical copy at jumpto.cc/book

This autumn, Code Clubs around the world competed in our first-ever global competition, and we were so excited to see the results. Now we’re even more excited to be announcing the lucky winners!

The challengeWhat does community mean to you? Is your community your school, your friends, or the town where you live?

We asked young people attending Code Clubs around the world to tell us about their community through code. Their starting point was a Code Club project that they could remix, change, and be as creative with as they liked!

Taking partClubs across the world from 17 countries including Croatia, Canada, China, and Malaysia took part in the competition.In their projects, we found out about club members’ journeys to school and things they love in their local area, and we even took part in a treasure hunt across New York City!

A USA treasure hunt from the Youth Innovation Club in New York City.

The judgingJudges from across the Code Club team had a wonderful time looking at all the submissions.

The entry from St Ursula’s School was about how communities support and protect each other

They really were impressed by the projects’ creativity, detail, and different interpretations of community.

And the winners are…GamesThe winners of the Games category are Caroline, Michael, Danil, Viktoria, Vladislav, and Ivan aged 10 and 11 from Ukraine, who made a quiz about their hometown Dnipro. The judges loved all the pictures the team included, and their sense of humour, which really came through in the quiz!

The runner-up is Archie, aged 9, from the UK, who made a game inspired by the mining heritage of his hometown of Barnsley.

Digital art and animationsThe winner of the Digital art and animations category is Kagan, aged 11. Our judges were really impressed with the research that had gone into the project, which was also very well-planned and thought through.

Our runners-up are Emmanuel and Samuel from Nigeria. The judges loved the presentation in the style of a movie and we learned a lot about their home Igando from the project.

And a special mention goes to Tahiri, aged 9, from Albania, and Rocco and Oliver, aged 10, from the UK who sent us the only two entries in the Music category — we’re sending you all some prizes!

Congratulations to you all! The winners will receive swag for their club including stickers, a Code Club book, and a special congratulations video from the Director of Code Club.

Join us for the next competition! Code Club runs regular competitions and giveaways exclusively for clubs that are registered on our website. Get your club started today at codeclub.org if you’re in the UK, or at codeclubworld.org if you’re based in another country across the world.